Chapter 1: Introduction
1.3 Literature Review and Offensive Realism
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1.3 Literature Review and Offensive Realism
The academic study of international relations is said to be grounded on the paradigm of realism which has served as the dominant explanation of international political phenomena.
Although political scientists have been seeking alternative interpretations of state behaviors and their interactions, most of the existing theories have founded their identities and arguments against that of realism. To adapt to the ebb and flow of the political environment, a number of theories have branched out within the realist paradigm. For example, William Wohlforth identified four generations of modern realists that have emerged since international relations was established as a distinct field of study in the early twentieth century: the inter-World Wars and wartime generation, the early Cold-War generation, a détente generation, and the post-Cold War generation.23
Yet, regardless of the evolution of the analytical methods and approach, realist theories converge around four fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of the international system and the behaviors of the states within.24 First, states are the most important actors in the study of international politics and are treated as the unit of analysis. Second, realists believe that the international system is anarchic in nature, meaning that no central authority or an ultimate arbitrator stands above states that can come to defend their security or interests when a state or a group of states show aggression towards others. Third, states are rational actors that are capable of devising strategies to maximize their chances of “survival,” which
23 William C. Wohlforth, “Realism,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press), 131-149.
24 See Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf); John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton); Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press) and Theory of International Politics (MA: Addison-Wesley); and William Wohlforth, “Realism,” in the Oxford Handbook of International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press).
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includes both territorial integrity and domestic political autonomy. Finally, realists defined the concept of “interest” in terms of “power” which they believe can most effectively ensure state survival.25
In the post-Cold War era, “offensive realism,” represented by John J. Mearsheimer and his iconic The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, has emerged as one of the most prominent realist theories. While offensive realism inherits the fundamental assumptions of the realism paradigm, it gives greater emphasis to the accumulation of power. Offensive realists believe that since no states can foresee others’ intentions and has no higher authorities to rely on within the anarchic international system, they must seek to maximize their own power to ensure state-survival. Mearsheimer further argued that “Great powers are primed for offense.
But not only does a great power seek to gain power at the expense of other states, it also tries to thwart rivals bent on gaining power at its expense.”26 Built on classical and neorealism, offensive realists provide a unique worldview based on five additional assumptions as follows.
First, while states are the basic unit of the realist analysis of international relations, offensive realists tend to focus on the “great powers” because they assume that “these states have the largest impact on what happens in international politics.”27 Great powers are determined on the basis of their relative military capability. Specifically, to be recognized as a great power, a state must possess “sufficient military assets to put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state in the world.”28 And even if the candidate ultimately suffers defeat, “it must have some reasonable prospect of turning the
25 Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 5. 26 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton), 3.
27 Ibid, 5.
28 Ibid, 3.
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conflict into a war of attrition that leaves the dominant state seriously weakened.”29 Aside from conventional forces, great powers in the nuclear age must also have “second-strike capability” to withstand a nuclear strike and retaliate against the aggressors.
Second, offensive realists hold that the “structural factors” like international anarchy and the distribution of power are responsible for the behaviors of great powers—including their constant fear of one another and the relentless competitions for power. In this respect, it is unlike classical realism which attributed such fear to human nature.
Third, offensive realists also assume that great powers are rational actors, which means that they are conscious of the anarchic world in which they inhabit and would meticulously calculate their chances of survival in it. They would devise strategies to secure their interests against others, and also undermine those that compete with them.
The next two assumptions deal with state “capabilities” and “intentions.” Offensive realists define “Capabilities” as the offensive military capabilities that great powers inherently possess, which make them a potential threat to others in the system. “Intentions” is defined as the intangible and ever-changing beliefs, concepts, or ideologies that reside within the minds of state leaders. While capabilities can be easily calculated by counting the tangible military assets that great powers own, intentions are almost impossible to measure. States are almost always uncertain about one another’s intentions, and for this reason states are perpetually fearful of an aggression from a malign counterpart. To gain some insight to a state’s intentions, researchers often have to rely on observing the foreign policy and rhetoric of its leaders.
29 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton).
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These assumptions together shape the offensive realist concept of “power.” Offensive realists asserted that the anarchic nature of the international system and the uncertainty of others’ intentions have led states to fear for their own survival and hence seek to maximize their share of the world’s distribution of power. The great powers, however, not only seek additional increments of power, but also aim to become the most powerful state in the system because “the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon.”30 To achieve hegemony, great powers would attempt to “gain power at the expense of other states” and to “thwart rivals bent on gaining power at its expense.” When changes in international balance-of-power favor their fellow competitors, great powers would even undermine the balance and redirect the changes in their own favor. In sum, great powers are prime for offense and their interactions are doomed to end tragically in war.
Offensive realists also find the number of great powers or “poles” within the system to have significant influence on how international politics works. For example, following the demise of the Soviet Union, the world is seen as “unipolar” under American hegemony. In recent years, however, the discussions on polarity have begun to change in the wake of China’s economic rise which has led scholars and pundits to debate the transition of the unipolar international system to a bipolar or multipolar world. Mearsheimer, for example, believed that Asia will become an “unbalanced multipolar system” with China being more powerful than other Asian great powers like Russia, Japan, and India.31 He also asserted that the U.S.-China rivalry in Asia will be more war-prone than that of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation because China will have the potential and incentive to become a hegemon. Yet, Mearsheimer has only made a tentatively prediction of the escalation of U.S.-China security
30 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton), 3.
31 Ibid, 398-399.
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competition, but has offered little insight into the causes and impacts of this transition of polarity.
Some scholars like Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth hold that China qualifies as an “emerging potential superpower” that stands out among other Asian great powers, but is not yet strong enough to alter the unipolar international system.32 However, while they believe that the American primacy will endure for a long time to come, the U.S.
must make changes to its grand strategy in preparation of balancing against China’s rise.
However, not all realist theories share such offensive realist pessimistic view about great power politics. Proponents of “defensive realism” argued that rather than anxiously seeking for more power, states are better off maintaining however much power they already possess.
Defensive realism, outlined by Kenneth Waltz in the Theory of International Politics, shares key theoretical assumptions like international anarchy and state-centrism with offensive realism. However, in regard to state behaviors and strategies for survival, Waltz rejected the idea that anarchy led states to act aggressively in their competitions for power. Instead, he made the opposite case that anarchy encourages states to behave defensively because “the first concern of states is not to maximize power but to maintain their position in the system.”33
Defensive realists provided several arguments that refuted offensive realist understanding of “power.” First, when a state attempts to gain power at the expense of others, the potential victims would join forces to balance against the aggressor and thereby leaving it worse off than it would have been had its refrained from seeking additional power. Defensive
32 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty-first Century: China’s Rise and the Fate of America’s Global Position,” International Security 40, no.3 (2016).
33 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (MA: Addison-Wesley), 126.
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realists therefore asserted that “At least in the long run, the balance of power that arises out of international anarchy punishes aggression; it does not reward it.”34 History has shown that the great powers that aim for hegemony has frequently earned self-defeat, and they are advised to adopt a defensive and moderate foreign policy.
Second, defensive realist pointed a way out of the “Thucydides’s Trap,” or the “security dilemma,” by distinguishing individual security and state security.35 Security dilemma arise from offensive realists’ assumptions of states “capabilities” and “intentions.” Specifically, any increments in a state’s military capability—even for the mere purpose of enhancing its own security—will be seen as a threat because its intentions are obscured to others. Due to the fear of an aggression, other states will respond by strengthen their own capabilities, and ultimately locking them in a vicious cycle of security competition. Yet, defensive realists asserted that “states are not as vulnerable as men are in a state of nature”36 and their demise is a difficult and prolonged process. In the face of a crisis, great powers can refrain from undertaking pre-emptive strikes until they have gained definitive evidence of an aggression and save from blundering into an unintended war.
Lastly, defensive realists proposed the concept of “offense-defense balance”37 which distinguishes defensive weapons and policies from offensive ones. By doing so, they argued that it is possible for states to adopt compatible strategies “to make itself more secure without
34 Jack Snyder, Myth of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (New York: Cornell University Press), 11.
35 John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” in World Politics, No. 2, 157-180.
36 Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press), 172.
37 See Jack Snyder, Myth of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (New York: Cornell University Press); Robert Jervis, “Cooperation in the Security Dilemma,” in World Politics (New York:
Cambridge University Press), 167-214; Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2006) and “Offense, Defense, and the Cause of War,” in International Security 22, no.4 (1988).
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making others less secure.”38 When offense has the clear advantage, meaning that “it is easier to destroy the other’s army and take its territory than it is to defend one’s own,”39 states are more likely to engage in war. Contrarily, when defense has the upper hand, states would choose to take on an assault than launching a preemptive strike. In the nuclear age, states with second-strike capabilities are even more capable of deterring aggressors.
Defensive realists therefore conclude that technological and geographical factors tilt heavily towards the defending party.
According to defensive realist optimistic view, the United States and China can avoid the “Thucydides’s Trap” as long as China makes clear that it has no aggressive intentions towards its neighbors nor the incentive to challenge the U.S. dominance in Asia. Yet looking at today’s U.S.-China relationship under President Donald Trump, it is clear that offensive realism remains more relevant to the reality. First, China’s rhetoric and foreign policy have revealed its ambitious and even aggressive intentions. Second, state leaders’ decisions may not always be as rational as believed and their perceptions of other states’ intentions are likely to lead to the escalation of a crisis. Stephen Van Evera, for example, has pointed that most of the modern great wars resulted from leaders’ misperceptions of their prospect to prevail.40 Lastly, as there are no agreed and reliable method to distinguish defensive weapons from offensive ones, the increase of Chinese military strength is most likely to be seen as a threat to other countries.
Apart from examining how China conveys its intentions, it is also important to look at how the American President Donald Trump interprets Chinese intentions. Other than a vague
38 Robert Jervis, “Cooperation in the Security Dilemma,” in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press), 187.
39 Ibid.
40 Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2006).
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definition of the concept of “intentions,” offensive realists has provided little information about the means and to measure it. Since offensive realists defined “Intentions” to be state leaders’ beliefs and perceptions of the world, one way for researchers to gain insights to the intentions of a state is to observe the discourse and rhetoric of its leaders and their foreign policies.
Rhetoric can be indicative of a state’s intention to launch a war because it “Usually precedes armed conflicts and hints at the important issues over which the upcoming war will eventually be fought.”41 The rhetoric and discourse of a Presidential speech, for example, may give away the state leader’s personal values, beliefs, and orientations in the decision-making process. At the same time, their public statements, made with the specific purpose of delivering certain messages to its recipients, particularly to a state’s domestic populace, also reflect the preferences and ideology of the targeted audience.
Foreign policy is a more concrete and definitive form of a state’s intentions for it is the ultimate product of decision-making. Foreign policy is also a reliable indicator because its effects are rather durable, as James Chace underlines, “An obsolete foreign policy cannot be lightly discarded; commitments once made are not easily broken.”42
When rhetoric and foreign policy come together, they can help shed light on a state’s intentions. For instance, Steve Bannon, the former White House Chief Strategist to President Donald Trump, views China as the primary economic threat to America. Bannon says, “If we don’t get our situation sorted with China, we’ll be destroyed economically.”43 With advisors
41 Drazen Pehar, “Leaders’ Rhetoric and Preventive Diplomacy: Issues We Are Ignorant About,” Knowledge and Diplomacy, 2002, accessed August 2, 2017,
https://www.diplomacy.edu/resources/general/leaders-rhetoric-and-preventive-diplomacy-issues-we-are-ignoran t-about.
42 James Chace, A World Elsewhere: The New American Foreign Policy (New York: Scribner), 5.
43 Joshua Green, “Bannon’s Back and Targeting China,” Bloomberg, September 28, 2017, accessed October 1, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/bannon-s-back-and-targeting-china.
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like Bannon championing the idea that portrays China as the primary threat to the U.S., it is safe to assume that President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy will likely take on a hardline position in dealing with China.
“Capabilities,” which is closely related to a state’s intentions, is critical to offensive realist study of U.S.-China relations. Offensive realists place their primary concern in the military capabilities. A state’s active military buildup, which encompasses many aspects ranging from the acquisition of more advanced technology, the increase in the enlistment of military personnel, and the adoption of new strategies and policies, can reflect the state’s intentions. A glimpse into China’s recent military development can help unveil its goals and ambitions; similarly, the U.S.’s military deployment can reveal some information of its planned response to China.
Offensive realists usually equate military capabilities to power; but in reality, states are also deeply concerned about their latent power, which is defined as the “socio-economic ingredients that go into building military power” and “is largely based on a state’s wealth and the overall size of its population.”44 Population alone can neither reflect a state’s economic capacity nor guarantee it a wealthy economy. Wealth, on the other hand, “incorporates both the demographic and the economic dimensions of power.”45 For this reason, offensive realists tend to employ wealth as the measure of latent power.
With the experiences of three European great powers, Mearsheimer argued that wealth underpins a state’s military strength; that is, it “constitutes the societal resources that a state has available to build military forces.”46 By this logic, China, which has largest population in
44 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton), 55.
45 Ibid, 61.
46 Ibid.
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the world and the largest economy by nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP), can transform itself into a military leviathan and upset the existing international balance-of-power.
Other schools of international relations theories have also come to challenge offensive realist analysis of the future U.S.-China relations. Neoliberalism, for instance, has criticized offensive realism for underrating the possibilities of cooperation between states on non-traditional security issues through international institutions. However, these criticisms, in truth, are not outright rejected by offensive realists, but simply received as supplements to their theory. Economic interdependence The author indeed finds it beneficial to take certain perspectives of these criticisms into consideration in the effort to enhance the arguments of offensive realist. However, it is not the aim of this study to go into the details of each and every one of these rebuttals; rather, the goal is to put the theory of offensive realist into practice by employing it to scrutinize the most important great power politics of the twenty-first century between the U.S. and China.
In the coming chapters, the author will gradually unravel the mystery of how the U.S.
President Trump responds to the increasing threat of a stronger China through the six indicators which derive from intentions and capabilities. While examining the intentions and military power of both China and the U.S, the author takes the angle of analysis largely from the perspective of the latter, as can be seen as below.
1) Is the U.S. actively increasing its capabilities?
2) Is the U.S. seeking new allies and strengthening its relations with existing ones?
3) Is the U.S. helping its allies to increase their capabilities against China?
4) Is the U.S. undermining China’s capabilities?
5) Is the U.S. preventing China from seeking new allies and sabotaging China’s relations with its existing friends?
6) Is the U.S. attempting to weaken the capabilities of China’s allies?